Personality and learning preferences of students in design and design-related disciplines

This paper explores the thinking and learning styles of art-based design students, and reports a personality survey of typical design students at two UK universities. Where teaching and learning styles do not match, there may be cognitive dissonance leading to poor knowledge transfer. Students state that they have such problems with their studies. Designers' strategies for problem-solving are different to many other professionals, and an intuitive way of working is preferred strongly. It is demonstrated that designers also have related styles of learning, and suitable treatments are proposed to match teaching and learning. Though designers' learning seems to be well matched to the teaching mostly employed in UK design schools, concern is expressed about current economic and other pressures which threaten its continuance

Design Guidelines...an unacceptable constraint on creativity or good design practice?

A programme of research was motivated by an identified training need within the School of Design at Staffordshire University. There was a specific requirement to develop computer based training materials for software tools used in multimedia development. Guidance was required to maintain a standard design approach for producing such materials. Initial investigations found that present 'how to do it' guides were insufficiently focused. The research centred on compiling a focused set of guidelines and related design techniques and heuristics to construct an appropriate guide. This paper discusses some of the findings and emerging issues of the research project, for example: generic (ambiguous) and emphatic (context specific) forms of guidelines; ineffective and effective published guidelines in the context of modern multimedia; a negative attitude by designers to present forms of guidelines; the need for a more focused approach to offering guidance for specific domain contexts; as multimedia has no widely accepted conventions, guidelines could help to establish principles of good design practice